What is copy? Copy is the text you find in advertising, particularly text for catalogs and direct mail solicitations. In other words, it’s the kind of text you want for your eBay auction ads and eBay Store catalog webpages. Copy writing is not necessarily hype like the short phrases in magazine advertisements. It’s persuasive writing in sentences and paragraphs.

Copy writing is an art. Those who do it well get paid handsomely. Good copy writing sells merchandise. Can you expect to write your auction ads like a professional copy writer? Probably not. (I know I can’t.) Yet you want to do the best job you can. It ultimately means more money in your pocket. Thus, it pays to learn a few writing guidelines that can substantially improve your copy writing.

Guidelines

What follows are some basic writing guidelines. These guidelines focus on the writing, not the content. Good writing is the first step. Clearly communicating information about products is the goal. Once you have mastered basic writing skills, you can read a book on copy writing and focus on content—that is, writing persuasive content.

Organize

Organize your thoughts before you start writing. If you have time, outline what you’re going to write. As they say, a good story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. So does a good eBay auction ad. In effect, you tell the story of your product. The story affects the purchasing decision of the buyer. If the story rambles on without any point or is just a list of specifications, it won’t have a lot of impact. As a result, the prosepctive buyer may remain undecided. If you write a coherent story and give it a point, it will lead a potential buyer to make a purchasing decision, and you will have achieved your purpose. What’s the point to make in your copy? Here’s the product (describe it). Here’s what it can do. And here’s what it can do for you. If you can get a potential buyer to make a decision—doesn’t matter whether it’s to buy or not to buy—generally your bids will increase (and the winning bids will be higher).

Here are some priorities for an organized ad:

1.   Full information on the product (e.g., specifications)
2.   Full information on the condition of the product (if not new)
3.   What the product can do
4.   Benefits of the product to a buyer
5.   Request to bid (or to buy)

With over 22 million items for sale every week, I can only give general guidelines in this article on copy writing. Each product is different, and some products may require special treatment for copy writing. But good organization in your writing will take you a long way down the road to writing solid and effective copy.

Make It Long

Remember, the Web is an informational medium. There is no shortage of space to tell the story of your product. This is not a classified ad where you pay by the word. You can use as many words as you need to, and the price for the space is the same.

In a mail order catalog, the descriptions of products are short because space is limited, but you will notice that the descriptions are much longer and more informational than in the hype of a magazine or newspaper display ad.

In direct mail solicitations (junk mail), the descriptions of products are particularly long and informational because even more space is available for one price. Good copy writers take advantage of the space available to make a thorough sales pitch to the reader. They focus on the benefits of the product’s features to the buyer. The reading space usually consists of whatever paper the seller can cram into one ounce (the smallest unit of weight and the lowest postage). That’s the equivalent of four 8.5 x 11 sheets.

Direct mail is very effective. We tend to discount this fact, because we don’t read direct mail in which we are not interested. But when a solicitation arrives in the mail for a product we happen to want or need that day, we read it. And often the solicitation is quite enticing.

Generally eBay product descriptions should be somewhere in length between a catalog description and a direct mail solicitation. You can justify writing longer ads for more expensive or more complex products. Your time is the real limitation here. The space is available.

Keep It Short

Having told you to make it long, I’m going to tell you to keep it short. What’s going on here? In this case, focus on your actual writing, not the amount of content. Use short words, short sentences, and short paragraphs. More people understand—and are comfortable reading— short words rather than long words. Short sentences read faster and are more understandable than long sentences. And reading short paragraphs goes faster and is less tedious than reading long paragraphs. So, write as much as you need to, but write it in short chunks with simple words.

Then too, you don’t have to use the all space available, which is practically unlimited. The objective is to say what you need to about a product to give a prospective buyer enough solid information to make a buying decision, no more and no less. For some products that may be two sentences and for other products it may be twenty or even two hundred sentences. Say what you need to and end it there.

Make It Personal

Don’t try to make your writing conform to some pretentious stereotype. For instance, you don’t want your ad to sound like a lawyer wrote it. No one will read it. Write in your own voice. Give your writing some personality. In other words, you don’t want to make your writing abstract and impersonal.

We all talk with numerous people every day, and we differentiate them by their personalities. We are very skilled at doing so. We feel comfortable with information that has a human voice. We get bored with or even become suspicious of impersonal communications.

That doesn’t mean that you have to overwhelm prosepctive buyers with your down-home dialog and charm, but it does mean that you can be yourself when you write your eBay auction ads. Write naturally as you would talk. That’s the best way to make your writing personal, and that’s the best way you can write.

Use Action Verbs

People are much more interested in who did what to whom than they are in what is. Use action verbs wherever possible and avoid the passive.

Action (active): John taped the package. Inactive: The package is taped. Passive: The package was taped by John.

Action moves reading along and gives power to the message. The passive puts readers to sleep. It’s not always possible to write with action verbs when copy writing, but use action verbs as much as possible.

Use Plain Language

This is similar to keeping it short. Use short words instead of long words wherever you can, and your language will be plainer. More people understand short words, and short words are easier to read for everyone. But it’s more than keeping your words short. Don’t use jargon or technical language.

Your object here is to present information on the product to the greatest number of prosepctive buyers. Your objective is not to inform readers that you are a member of the in -group (associated with the product) by tossing around technical terms and jargon. When you use plain language , you focus your message on the product and on informing readers. When you use lots of jargon, you are, in effect, focusing the message on yourself and leaving many readers baffled.

Sure, for many products you need to include technical information, product specifications (containing technical information), and industry jargon. But keep it to a minimum, and when you use anything but plain language, explain it to your readers.

You can argue that for certain technical items, the only bidders will be prospective buyers who will understand the industry jargon. I don’t buy that argument. For instance, I’m not an electrician or an electronics technician, but I bought a voltmeter a few years back. It was a one project purchase, and I wanted to pay the lowest price possible. Yet I needed to be assured that I bought the right voltmeter to get the job done. Jargon didn’t help me—it hindered me—in making my purchasing decision. In fact, I couldn’t find an informative eBay ad for a voltmeter among the many auction ads on eBay for voltmeters. Consequently, I bought the voltmeter offline at Radio Shack.

Don’t Use Vague Modifiers

Modifiers such as very, reasonably, basically, real, and great add little to your writing. Avoid using them and weed them out when you edit.

Don’t Use Abbreviations

We all live in our own little world. The abbreviations we use are selfevident. The problem is that only a few of our compatriots understand them. The remainder of the people on planet Earth are confounded by such abbreviations.

Originally eBay was a small group of collectibles traders. First, one hundred. Then one thousand. Then ten thousand, etc. They developed a set of abbreviations that most early participants understood. Today there are over 100 million registered eBay users. Collectibles account for less than 6 percent of eBay ’s volume. How many eBay members today understand the traditional eBay abbreviations? My guess is that 99.5 percent don’t. Yet you see more abbreviations in eBay ads you do in a collegiate dictionary. And that’s just eBay abbreviations.

Products carry their own set of abbreviations. Don’t use those abbreviations either. Many potential buyers just won’t understand what you’re saying. They won’t bid. The bidding will be thinner. And the selling price will be lower.

Edit Yourself

I could tell you to have everything you write edited by someone, and that would be good advice. Unfortunately, few eBay retailers would do it. After all, they are busy business people. Where are they going to find the time to get someone to edit their copy?

Still, you can edit yourself. It’s best when you can let a lot of time go by between edits. Two weeks is better than two days. But even when you can’t let much time go by, at least edit your copy writing yourself anyway.

Edit for spelling and grammar and also eliminate words you don’t need. If you get rid of words that aren’t necessary to what you’re saying, you make your writing easier to read and more powerful.

When you sell the same items routinely, you will have the chance to edit your copy each time you post another auction ad. This gives you the opportunity to edit until it you get it just right. Once you get it right, the copy will keep on selling.

Live Without Fear

You can’t worry about spelling, grammar, and structure. If you did, you’d never post your first eBay auction ad. Do the best job you can and get the ad up. However, this point of view doesn’t mean you shouldn’t strive to improve your copy writing. Keep at it. Practice makes perfect, particularly when it comes to writing.

Use what’s available. That means spell-checkers, grammar-checkers, and even software that helps you structure your writing. I couldn’t pass a middle school spelling test to save my life. Yet a spell checker keeps me out of trouble—most of the time.

Cost-Effectiveness Review

Good copy writing takes time. Time’s not money, but it’s still a finite commodity. You have to write your copy (or hire it done). You might as well learn to do a good job since you need to write copy one way or another. But you need to conserve your time too. Perhaps the best approach is to develop a strategy that limits the amount of time you spend writing. Here are some things you can do:

1.   Give priority for writing good copy to products you will sell again and again.

2.   Give priority to your most expensive products.

3.   Use links to manufacturers’ websites to supplement your product information wherever possible. In other words, if a manufacturer provides it, use it. Don’t reinvent the wheel.

4.   Copy product literature from packages or product flyers wherever possible. (You may be violating a copyright, but this is a widespread practice on eBay. I don’t recommend that you do this, but if you do, limit it to one-time sales. For repeat sales of products, write your own copy, particularly for eBay Stores and Froogle.)

The trouble with doing a cost-effectiveness review regarding copy writing is that the cost-effectiveness analysis applies only to that portion of the time it takes you to do a good job over and above the time it takes you to do a mediocre job. It’s this extra time that you need to consider in your cost-effectiveness evaluation. Since you will improve with learning and practice, you will become more efficient in writing good copy over time. Considering the importance of good copy, I have to conclude that competent copy writing is time well spent on marketing your products.